I’m only sleeping

To watch your child being put to sleep is a horrible, horrible experience.

The first time, five years ago, I held him in my arms. I recall him as screaming and crying – and then, the second they injected anesthesia in his hand, his head fell back and he became soft, like a ragdoll. The next thing I knew the nurses took him from me, quick quick onto the bed to put an oxygen mask over his face and that’s the last thing I saw of him before they shooed me out of the room.

Today he was laughing and talking with the anesthetic nurses, lying calmly on the bed and watching the instruments around him with great interest. I was sitting next to him but nobody paid much attention to me. He tried the oxygen mask, proudly watched his heart activity on the monitor, smiled briefly at me and then BAM he was gone. Eyes and mouth half open, completely relaxed. Gone. I touched his cheek and then, once again, shoo shoo out you go now mamma.

It took an hour before they came to tell us that he had woken up again, and that hour was one of the longest hours in my life. Everytime someone walked by I expected them to turn to us with a grave expression, telling us that there had been a complication. Not that I know if there are any possible complications from a simple ear operation (they inserted tubes into his eardrums), but I’ve heard stories about people who never woke up from their sleep. If there is one thing that would break me, it is if something would happen to him. That’s the one thing I… I can’t even write about it. That’s just the most devastating thing that can happen to a parent. To me. How do you survive something like that?

After an hour we were sent upstairs to meet him. He was sitting in bed with a smile on his face, asking us when he would get his icecream. He said that he felt a bit dizzy but otherwise fine, and where was his icecream?!

He got his icecream, and then another one, and two glasses of Coke and then on the way home we got him a hamburger meal which he also finished.

Then he was full, and happy.